I once saw a video of Quentin Tarantino talking about Chungking Express, and apparently the director basically made it to get over editor’s block: he’d spent so long working on *Ashes of Time * that he became sick of editing, so he decided to take a break by making a simple, fun movie before he went back to editing. Apparently he originally had three stories he wanted to tell, but since Faye Wong and Brigitte Lin’s stories went so well he called it quits right there, and went on to make the third story in Fallen Angels.
I think the best advice for watching Chungking Express came from Ebert:
Modern for 1952, but probably completely bizarre for a black & white 1920’s musical, which is what the scene is supposed to be for. Singing In the Rain is a great movie, but The Dancing Cavalier (the movie they’re making) would have been a confusing pile of crap, with its mixture of avant-garde dancing and costume drama.
The novel’s back story does explain it all, but I’m not sure Kubrick left it out because of time constraints ro anything similar. Just as he may not have ditched the topiary for a maze due to the day’s weak special effects. Will try to dig it up online, but there are pretty compelling theories behind both the dog/bear man and the maze being tied to Freud and Greek mythology (including the Minotaur, obviously).
> In Cocoanuts, Groucho Marx makes probably the earliest aside to the audince,
> leaving the others and talking close in to the camera. Probably an ad lib or
> something meant to be a joke for the film crew and supposed to be cut.
You’re both thinking of Animal Crackers, not The Cocoanuts.
For me, it’s the ballet sequence in Oklahoma! I had never seen the movie before attending a screening at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences theater (in the original Todd-AO, 70mm, 30 fps format!) about seven or eight years ago. It’s a fairly standard 1950s musical, with singing, dancing, and all that.
Then all of a sudden, there’s a dream sequence in which the romantic leads are replaced by lookalike ballet dancers, and there’s an impressionist modern dance that’s completely out of character with the rest of the movie.
Now, I’ve never been a big fan of musicals, or of ballet, for that matter. But this unexpected sequence completely blew me away, and raised the film way above the ordinary in my estimation.
I’m not sure if Chaplin’s The Kid counts as a normal movie either, but in any case the dream sequence in it sure is more than a bit off the wall. Up to this point the movie has been amazingly family friendly, and then there’s the fantastic and quite nabokovian sequence where the Tramp, dreaming that he’s an angel in Heaven, gets seduced, literally, by evil, which has crept into Heaven in the shape of an amazingly vampy twelve year old Lita Grey. (Of course, the tender miss Grey must have made quite an impression on old Charlie, as three years later - she’s now fifteen - he runs into her again, promptly casts her as the lead in The Gold Rush as an excuse to get into her pants, and of course proceeds to knocks her up, marry her and fire her from the movie. That whole story goes on to a very sticky end.)
By the way, nice to see some fans of Chungking Express. One of my all-time favorites, that one.
I took it a little differently–the story is largely about Francis’s good/normal self struggling with his bad/red-dragon self. By giving the woman an opportunity to examine the tiger, he showed kindness and love. It gives us hope that his relationship with the woman will help empower his good side to win the struggle. Unfortunately, it’s too late. But the scene reminds us that Francis isn’t just a monster.
> You’re both thinking of Animal Crackers, not The Cocoanuts.
Actually, I wasn’t thinking of either one. I saw them both many years ago, and I couldn’t remember which one the scenes which parodied Strange Interlude were in. When I read Hint: Kt x P’s post, I remembered the parody scenes with Groucho speaking to the audience, but I couldn’t remember which one it was in. I checked the Wikipedia entry for Strange Interlude and saw that it referred to Animal Crackers, not The Cocoanuts, but I wasn’t sure if such scenes were in just one of the films or both of them. I decided not to mention this in my post since it didn’t seem to matter to my point.
